History of YouTube

Here again, I am kicking off new Web History series where I will share about History of various web initiatives. Hope I will do justification to these blog series by contributing decent content across each series in the coming days :) Wish me luck :)

Jokes apart, it always important to know the history which tells us how the current successful venture evolved and its early struggles. Hope you agree with me.

Whose History are we looking today??!!

Well, I know that you would have already guessed it from this blog post title.

But I have to announce it formally that it is going to be YouTube and put its logo before I begin this post :)

So here we go, lets see how YouTube born…

Who founded it?

YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. Haven’t seen them yet??!! Don’t worry, here they are

I hope you can identify who is Chad Hurly, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim in the above snap..Go figure :)

So how it happened?

• Chad Hurley & Steve Chen developed the idea for YouTube during the early months of 2005, after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen's apartment in San Francisco.
• Jawed Karim did not attend the party and denied that it had occurred, and Chad Hurley commented that the idea that YouTube was founded after a dinner party

"was probably very strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story that was very digestible."

When YouTube jump into the action??!!

• YouTube's early headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California.
• The domain name www.youtube.com was activated on February 15, 2005, and the website was developed over the subsequent months.

First YouTube Video – Me at the zoo - an 18 seconds video!!!

The first YouTube video was entitled Me at the zoo, and shows founder Jawed Karim at San Diego Zoo. The video was uploaded on April 23, 2005, and can still be viewed on the site. You can watch the video here :)

As we speak now, February 16,2009 , this 18 seconds !! video is viewed 576,808 times

When YouTube went live and heights climbed thereon

• YouTube offered the public a beta test of the site in May 2005, six months before the official launch in November 2005.
• The site grew rapidly, and in July 2006 the company announced that more than 65,000 new videos were being uploaded every day, and that the site was receiving 100 million video views per day.
• It is estimated that 13 hours of new videos are uploaded to the site every minute, and that in 2007 YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000. In March 2008, YouTube's bandwidth costs were estimated at approximately US$1 million a day.
• Alexa ranks YouTube as the third most visited website on the Internet, behind Yahoo! and Google. If you are interested in viewing the ranking details, it’s here for YouTube, Google and Yahoo

Google acquired YouTube

In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had acquired YouTube for US$1.65 billion in Google stock, and the deal was finalized on November 13, 2006.

YouTube History Video

To add icing to the cake(yeah, you have to agree that this blog post of mine is indeed a delicious cake !!!), here is the video ‘The History of YouTube’

Hope you enjoyed it…

Stay tuned…

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